An Amazing Warehouse
by J. M. Faulkner
Part 1 appears in this issue.
conclusion
Again, I thought of myself. Would I really prefer squatting in the sewers to slaving in my father’s shop? In our grandest fall-out, had his company ever made me feel as utterly dreadful as this warehouse?
I offered Juan a shrug.
“And how come no one here worked at Brassard’s before the takeover? A hundred people and everybody’s a new hire.”
“So they quit. The workload got too much.”
“Except no one quits, Rajiv. None of it makes sense. So those that stay, how are they doing it?”
Because they don’t have a choice, I thought. Because we’re black, Hispanic, Indian and every other shade under the rainbow but white American.
My expression must have been blank, because he stepped closer and buried a hand in his pocket, eyes fleeting around the shelves and cabinets. He whispered, his breath moist on my cheek: “I’m micro-dosing.”
“What?”
“Speed.” He produced a plastic sandwich bag full of powder. “It’s the only thing keeping me from dropping dead. Don’t look at me like that. Rajiv, what option have I got? You want some?”
I shook my head.
“We can’t go on like this — Rajiv, wait!”
I was fully awake now, my heart thudding. I slipped past his groping fingers and bounded through a gap in the shelves.
Malcolm stood with his back to us, collapsing cardboard boxes and laying them flat on a pallet.
Juan came up short beside me, swallowed and shoved his drug-filled fist into his pocket. In that awful pause, I fancied I heard Juan’s heartbeat about as clearly as my own. When Malcolm didn’t react, a thin and worried smile spread over Juan’s lips, and with this parting gesture he hurried off.
I exhaled, hard. How had I found myself cornered like that? Juan was clearly an out-and-out lunatic, and he had wanted to draw me into a crime. No, insomnia would keep me out of that sleeping cubicle and nothing else.
Insomnia, my superpower.
“Are you tired?”
It took a moment for the question to register, and a few more to register the man that had asked it, for Malcolm had his back to me and was bending away at the cardboard, his technique methodical. Deliberate.
“Don’t be like Juan, Rajiv. If you need one, take a nap. There’s no shame in it. We’re a team here. An army, really.” At length, he ripped a string of tape from a box. “In the Christmas runup, we’re soldiers fighting for a common goal. Once the battle’s won, it’ll be because of our camaraderie. You understand?”
Oh, I understood, but I for one wasn’t going to be his sepoy.
What I said was, “Maybe later I’ll take you up on that.”
My exchange with Juan had put me behind schedule. An hour later, I was starting to wonder if I had dreamed the whole interaction. Speed, here? Pfft, no chance. I put the memory aside and focused on the task at hand.
After finishing my lunchtime cola, I unbuckled my belt and emptied my bladder into the plastic bottle under the table. There were few other options to make up time. The quota loomed.
* * *
I never saw Juan Torres again, so I thought it safe to assume Malcolm had given him the boot and I had quite unwittingly passed a test, although I did find an anonymous note in my locker. Scrawled handiwork read: Don’t fall asleep.
But every night shift pressed me further beyond my limits. Then the unthinkable happened.
Bleary-eyed, I descended the stairs at home one evening, preparing to leave for the warehouse. My family was dining in the living room, cutlery tapping on dishware. Binita, my sister, was laughing at something my mother had said, no doubt at Aunt Maryam’s expense. But it wasn’t mean-spirited. Just family.
When I stooped to tie my shoelaces, my knees gave a tremendous pop.
The living room door opened, and Binita’s splendid cackling laced with spices and my mother’s curry sauce fanned in my direction. The door closed again and the laughter fairly stifled.
“Rajiv.”
“Dad?”
He stood in the hallway in a beige cardigan. He tucked his hands into his trouser pockets and pinched his lips, all while gently rocking on his heels. “Going to work?” he ventured, and before I could reply, he said, “You know, you don’t have to go in today. Why don’t you stay at home?”
I can only imagine myself staring at him, uncomprehending. Right up until that moment, him condoning — no, inviting me to slack off work and spend time with him seemed about as likely as a cactus sprouting from my fingertip.
“You look tired.” He wet his lips, no doubt framing words that didn’t come naturally to him. “Have dinner with us, Rajiv.”
So, there is a god, I thought. And his gift is a full belly and the joyous music of my family poking fun at one another. Afterward, I could go back to my room and throw myself on the duvet. How I wanted it, such a sleep that I would wake up drunk and mindless.
“Dad,” I said, “there’s a week left until I’m done. I’ll have money enough for Christmas presents. Job’s a good ’un.”
He stood a little taller at that, his chest broad and eyes twinkling. Then he puffed through his lips and shook his head. His wooly caterpillar eyebrows bunched. No, admiration wasn’t the message he wanted to convey. Can you believe it? The all-work, no-play visage familiar to everyone in Suffolk, Nebraska was eclipsed by compassion.
“Give up the job. Come and work with me in the shop — I know, I know. I’m not an easy companion, but you’re an adult now. Maybe things will be different. Your mother and I don’t like seeing you like this. Work with me, part-time, please — and I’ll pay you a wage this time. What do you say?”
What could I say? Sweat broke out on the nape of my neck, and his unanswered question weighed between us.
“A week left, Dad.” I nodded firmly and gnawed the corner of my lip, like I was wrestling the dilemma, chomping it into manageable chunks. And I was doing that, but I couldn’t look at him for fear I’d change my mind. A week was survivable, I decided. “Maybe after that, would you have me?”
Those brooding brows of his appeared entirely less brooding.
* * *
But the night came when I fell asleep at the wheel of a forklift and slashed somebody in two. The fork launched the severed torso against a stack of clattering pallets. Legs bumped and thrashed under my wheels, and I jolted awake.
It was Malcolm.
The supervisor’s jovial façade was gone. It was pointless to maintain.
A great, whirring cog spun his belly. He hinged at the waist and clicked across the concrete, his jaw broken, his mouth bent into a frozen rectangle. But it didn’t keep him from articulating. A static thunder emitted from his throat: “Seize him.”
A figure leaped from behind the shelving, and I gave the forklift’s steering wheel a sharp pirouette. The vehicle about-turned and a raised tine clotheslined the aggressor across the throat. He went flat on his back, and I stomped the accelerator.
My neck jerked as I plowed the forklift down the nearest aisle, not daring to look back, and not knowing where I was going, either. The shoes clapping in my wake assured me that neither mattered, so I screeched across the warehouse, careless of the cardboard and plastic shooting out from beneath my wheels.
Whether the cog spinning in Malcolm’s belly was an illusion or not, I’d ponder when I got the hell out of there. I’d seen him broken quite in two and yet... no time to speculate. Someone jumped onto the forklift and reached into the cab. I veered into a wall and sheared him off.
A column caught me off guard, and one of the tines protruding from the forklift whacked its edge, bringing the vehicle around me to an abrupt stop. I was hurled forward onto the dashboard, the steering wheel punching me full in the stomach.
Click, click, click.
I sank into the seat, a trickle of sweat beading down my cheek. Gasping for air, I wiped it away. Blood wet my hand.
Click, click, click.
Malcolm wheeled around the bend, his workers — my colleagues — fast behind him. “Rajiv, you’re not being a team player.” He steadied his injury with one hand, threw me a forefinger, and shouted, “Mutiny.”
I shifted the forklift into reverse and swiveled into the nearest aisle, taking out a row of boxes on the third shelf with the forklift’s tines, littering the ground. My pursuers had to skid to keep on top of me and correct their course. A hand whacked and scraped off the forklift’s rear.
At the end of the aisle, I spun around. A dozen workers were pounding after me, but my abrupt turn had given me the slip I needed to pull off my plan. I accelerated and chopped one of the towering shelves with the tines. It leaned to, hung there a second, then toppled onto my pursuers with an almighty boom.
Now for the exit. Knuckles white on the steering wheel, I slammed the pedal underfoot, the wheels squeaked, and the footfalls at my back fell away. Ahead, through a great door, the pale grey light of dawn bled through the plastic strip curtains — and the path was clear. I was going to make it!
Two workers burst through the flaps, sprinting. If I didn’t stop, I’d kill them for sure, but I couldn’t stop, either. God only knew what Malcolm would do to me, so I tucked my chin, ready for the collision.
They pounced and took a tine each in the gut for their trouble. But rather than hang there limply, their arms flailed and blocked my view. Artic blue beams emitted from their eye sockets, frozen headlights flooding my vision. I was feeling for the mechanism to lower the fork when disaster struck. Something clipped my front wheel. We overturned and ground across the concrete.
I should have been wrenching myself from the cab, but instead I lay there stupefied and bleeding. When what little of my senses returned, it was too late.
The night shift team ripped me from the forklift while I kicked and elbowed to break loose. I connected with a cheekbone. A plate of something like plexiglass dropped from an eyeball. I chomped the nearest arm that arrested me, and my teeth came away with a taut cable.
They hauled me into the sleeping cubicle and slammed the entrance shut. Electronic locks hissed as they bolted. I balled my fists at the sound and hammered the door for all my worth.
“Let me out. Please, please — I didn’t see anything. Dad!”
Cold darkness fell. I backed away from the windowless exit, looking for another means of escape, but I could hardly make out the silhouetted hand I waved in front of me. My breath came loudly to my attention, trebled, and gifted the startling onset of drowsiness.
Don’t sleep, Rajiv, I insisted. Not when you’ve achieved so much.
A figure detached itself from the gloom, clanked something on the wall, and reeled out a long shelf whose metallic twinkle reminded me of a mortician’s table. As I retreated from it, a small light turned itself on overhead and cast a dim but sufficient glow.
A man entirely of bronze lay on the table like a cadaver. To the sound of my fumbling against the far wall, its face hinged wide open to reveal a smooth, spherical case behind its brow. Screws, bolts, drill bits and other tools were spread out on what looked to be a surgical tray next to the shelf.
The figure, whose presence I had almost forgotten due to the bronze man, steadily peered around at me, and for the dark I could only see lidless eyes, teeth without gums, and the gleam of a golden, robotic skull.
Can’t say I remember going under. To fight was futile.
* * *
I used to wonder about my decision to work another Christmas in Brassard’s warehouse. Time to time, these pieces would bubble up inside — doubt or panic, a feeling that I didn’t know when or where I was — but in due course these unpleasantries were easy enough to suppress. Occasionally, when I remember my dad’s face, I recall a fondness too: his woolly brows shuffling as he scanned a newspaper over breakfast. Better was the first time he let me man the cash register.
But this misplaced nostalgia is disappearing with time, and now I know that I didn’t love him, nor did he love me. You will be experiencing similar nightmares, now that you’ve slept in the company cubicle, and to those of you who suffer I say this: Relax, new colleagues. I’ve adjusted to the demands of the night shift, and Malcolm isn’t so bad once you get to know him. I’m part of the team again — all cogs in a productive machine.
Copyright © 2024 by J. M. Faulkner
